


Stars, or The Creation of Mr. Cutter

by goodbee



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Pre-Canon, References to Canon, References to Shakespeare, from about 60-70 years pre-canon to like season 4, matthew neumann, rachel maxwell and jacobi are all referenced but they don't appear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 05:26:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20270701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodbee/pseuds/goodbee
Summary: Matthew slid out of his bed. His head felt light and the world felt unreal, like there was no way this brick wall of a man was talking to him and he was in his pajamas.“Care to tell us what the hell is going on?” Matthew’s dad spat. “Is this about the - is this about Matt’s goddamn aliens?” The first brick wall man sighed.“They aren’t aliens, Mr. Neumann. Your son has - somehow - stumbled onto a highly classified air force operation called Project Menagerie.”Mrs. Neumann went still. “What does that mean for Matthew?” she asked, all the tremor that left her body now apparent in her voice. “Is he in trouble?”—In which Matthew Neumann grows up to be someone else entirely.





	Stars, or The Creation of Mr. Cutter

“‘It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves,’” Matthew murmured to the sky. He was laying on top of his sleeping bag, perfectly still in the cool summer night. 

“D’you reckon there’s someone else out there? D‘you think there are aliens up there, somewhere, looking up at their sky on their planet and asking their friends if we exist? Do they know we’re here? It’s an awful lonely thought to think we’re the only ones out here, isn’t it? Mankind are the pioneers, the cartographers, the compass needles of God. Don’t you think that we must be pointing to something? We base our clocks and our stories around what we see up there, up in the sky. Don’t you think there must be someone else up there, pointing right back to us, Dale?”

“No,” Dale said, and rolled to face away from Matthew. Matthew sighed.

— 

Matthew was a gangly teenage boy with curly red hair and freckles like that looked like God had sifted out cinnamon all over his face. By all accounts, he shouldn’t have been attractive, but his warm brown eyes and snaggletooth smile seemed to charm everyone he spoke to. He had never once paid attention in class, but he always got A’s on tests. He spent most of his days after school in his dad’s shed, fiddling with wires and screws. He spent most of his days during school doodling plans and ideas in his books and on his desks. He liked people, he really did; he just happened to like other things more.

His best friend, Dale, had never once pretended to understand it. He thought Matthew was off the cob, and was fine by both of them. Matthew had no problem being crazy if it meant he could keep being as he was.

It was 1948 when they sent the first manned rover into space. Matthew stared at the sky all night, even though he knew he had no chance of seeing it. He just looked up into the sky and thought,  _ something’s up there. _

— 

Matthew’s radio telescope took up all of his time. He brushed off three invitations to the Sadie Hawkins dance and stopped hanging around after school. As soon as the last bell rang he was running home to work out in the shed.

It took nearly a year before the telescope was finished. On a summer night in 1949, he stayed up on the roof of the shed all night with it, just to see if anything happened.

Something happened.

The radio telescope picked up a time sequence of mechanical pulses, definitely coming from outside of the atmosphere.

He shouted so loud he woke the neighbors.

— 

His science teacher went over the telescope eight times, stopping just short of completely taking it apart just to make sure there weren’t any faults in the machine itself. There weren't. But it was picking up impossible signals. Matthew sat by and watched as nearly every teacher in the school looked over it and, one by one, came up with theories, different explanations for what could be going on. And, one by one, Matthew pointed out all the ways their theories were impossible, until even the most resolute teachers had to admit that there was a chance that Matthew had found something really, really big.

That Saturday, Matthew put his radio telescope in the back of his dad’s pickup and drove it all the way down to the local college. And he sat, again, as all the professors came up with the same theories his teachers had, and he again disproved them.

But one professor stepped up and looked over Matthew telescope, then over Matthew himself, and he stood in silence for a few moments.

“Son,” he said. “I think you’ve found an alien.”

— 

Matthew spent the next two weeks writing papers and talking to local reporters. People who had never left the town they were born in were very interested in a boy that found life outside of their whole planet. To his little backwater town, Matthew was almost a celebrity. A professor from the University of California even came to talk to him, look at his findings, and offer him a scholarship.

Matthew kept his radio telescope on the roof of his shed and checked the readings as often as he could. The pulses kept coming consistently.

Matthew was in bed when the cars pulled up to his house. He could hear his mom talking to somebody at the door, the indignant sound she made followed by heavy boots stomping through the house. Matthew winced at the flood of bright light as his door was flung open and the light from the hall spilled in.

“Matthew Neumann?” asked the man standing in the door, though it somehow sounded more like an arraignment than a question. Matthew just nodded. The man flicked on the lights in the room. “Come with me, kid.”

Matthew slid out of his bed. His head felt light and the world felt unreal, like there was no way this brick wall of a man was talking to him and he was in his pajamas. 

The man sat Matthew down on his couch as if it wasn’t  _ his couch _ , like the man owned it. His mother was already sitting there, bouncing nervously, and another brick wall man was pushing Matthew’s dad to do the same.

The first brick wall man - Matthew could see him better now, he looked like a human buzzcut - said something into a walkie-talkie, and more brick wall men came in. They walked right through the living room and into Matthew’s room without a word.

“Care to tell us what the hell is going on?” Matthew’s dad spat. “Is this about the - is this about Matt’s goddamn aliens?” The first brick wall man sighed.

“They aren’t aliens, Mr. Neumann. Your son has - somehow - stumbled onto a highly classified air force operation called Project Menagerie.”

Mrs. Neumann went still. “What does that mean for Matthew?” she asked, all the tremor that left her body now apparent in her voice. “Is he in trouble?”

“It means he needs to stop sticking his damn nose where it don’t belong. He’s a kid, we ain’t gonna arrest him.”

Mrs. Neumann whispered a quiet “Thank you, God,” while Mr. Neumann narrowed his eyes.

“What’re you here for, then? What are your goons doin’ in his room?”

Before the human buzzcut could respond, the rest of the brick wall army came out of Matthew’s room, arms full of metal and paper.

“We’re making sure he doesn’t do it again.”

The room went silent for a moment, the only sound a discordant marching and clanking of metal pieces. Matthew’s eyes widened as he realized what the human buzzcut was saying.

“You can’t do that!” Matthew yelled, shooting to his feet. “I  _ built  _ those, you can’t just destroy them!”

“Sit down, son,” buzzcut said. Mrs. Neumann took Matthew’s hand and gently guided him to sit.

“Mr., Mrs., and Matthew Neumann, you are all officially bound under the Official Secrets Act. You are not to discuss anything you’ve learned tonight with  _ anyone.  _ Not your best friend, not your teachers, not your pastor. Anyone else asks about your ‘aliens’, you tell them your satellite was actin’ up.”

“Radio telescope,” Matthew muttered.

Buzzcut made them sign some papers and his crew left as suddenly as they’d come, leaving no trace that they had ever stepped foot inside. 

Except for in Matthew’s room. It looked empty, like someone was packing to move out more than that a teenage boy lived there. Just a bed, a dresser, and a couple old model airplanes.

Matthew buried his face in his pillow and cried.

—

He was different after that. His grades stayed up, but he never raised his hand in class. He was still himself, just less. When Dale stayed the night, they slept inside, not under the stars.

Matthew didn’t stop looking up at the sky, though. When he graduated high school he went to college for engineering, and when he graduated from that, he found some people like him who wanted to know what was outside the atmosphere as badly as he did. They didn’t have much money or really any clientele, but they worked long hours on radio equipment and satellites. And, eventually, someone noticed.

Matthew’s outfit was acquired by an aeronautics company called Wright-Goddard. So he kept a charming smile and worked hard, same as before. And like before, his work got noticed. He worked and charmed himself up the ranks of Wright-Goddard, all the way to vice president. He got the first interstellar mission off the ground, and then he got the second one. He sent people to visit the stars he had watched so carefully. 

The third one failed. And Matthew, having received so much credit for the first two, received all the blame. Four lives lost on his watch. Four lives, and one job. 

Matthew Neumann was fired. Dishonorably discharged from Wright-Goddard’s paramilitary operation. 

He sent out a memo as his last action as vice president. A suggestion, for a new department. Communications. 

He hadn’t talked to his family in years and had no desire to, no desire to go back to his home. Money was no issue, he had plenty of that. Money and nothing else. 

So he worked with what he had. For years, he lived in his small house with his money and himself and his ideas and his plans. He grew bitter and old. His smile stayed plastered on his face from all his years wearing it, but his eyes, though wrinkled at their corners, shone with no kindness. The dust of his home settled in his throat so everything he said came out dusty. Not that he said very much.

He did not know that he was growing old. There was no way to see how the world was changing from the inside of his house, and he did not look in his mirrors. So when he fell and could not get up to reach the phone, it was nearly four hours before the mailman saw him through the window and was able to call an ambulance. 

The white lights of the hospital and the frailty of his own body and the unfamiliar words and technology the younger nurses seemed to use told Matthew how long it had been. His bright red hair had dulled to grey, and the doctors told him that he was lucky to survive. 

He left the hospital in a wheelchair, and he talked to everyone he saw. 

It was less than a month before old Mr. Neumann was a fixture of the community. He made connections with every cashier at the grocery store and remembered the garbage man’s birthday. Nothing ever happened without Matthew hearing it from someone. So of course he heard about the smart, broken little girl who made her own dolls. When he found her, she was working on one. 

“Hello, little girl. I want you to make a doll for me. And it must be your very best doll. It must look like a real person, and sound like a real person, and be a real person. Can you do this for me?

The girl thought for a moment. Then she said, "And if I can?"

The old man replied, "Then you and I will fix the world. I will be young and you will be whole and the world will finally be everything it could be. Everything it should be."

—

By the time the little girl could finish the doll, Mr. Neumann couldn’t leave his bed anymore, and the girl wasn’t much better off. She had a rolling oxygen tank and an ever changing array of machines to keep her heart beating. She worked in his living room where he had dragged the bed some time before, and he called in people to help her. He told her that she was remarkable, and she told him that his talent for finding people wasn’t bad either. She wasn’t so little anymore. 

“Either you are going to die today, or you are never going to die,” she said to him. She stuck something in his head and it would have hurt horribly if he had any pain left in him. 

—

“I was worried it hadn’t worked,” the girl said, and Mr. Neumann heard her more clearly than he had heard anything in years. He saw his living room and he saw every speck of dust. He took a breath and felt the air fill his lungs with no hitch nor shudder. 

“I never doubted you for a second,” he said, and the sound of his own voice made him smile because he had never heard it before. It was new. 

—

Mr. Arthur Keller got a job at the recently renamed Goddard Futuristics. He fit right in immediately, and worked his way up the ranks quickly. He found an old memo, an idea for a new department, and he saw to it that it was made. 

Communications.

—

Goddard Futuristics cycled through Directors of Communications fairly quickly. Every ten years, max. They were all smart, charming men, respected by their superiors, admired by their subordinates. The Communications department became vital to the operation of the company. No other department had access to all the others, for basic security purposes, so it was the job of Communications to safeguard all the company’s plans and secrets.

A time after Mr. Keller, a man named Mr. Carter took up the mantle. He immediately hired a young woman named Dr. Pryce as his second-in-command and the department’s Scientific Advisor, a title which, previously, did not exist, and which had very little meaning but seemed very important. Dr. Pryce spoke to no one unless absolutely necessary, and seemed to answer to no one but Carter. Mr. Carter called everyone by their first name, regardless of rank, but everyone called him Mr. Carter, Carter, or sir. No one dared to try his first name. Except Dr. Pryce. She called him William like it was nothing, and he called her Miranda to her face. To everyone else, he said “Dr. Pryce” like a dad calling his wife “mom” in front of their kids, or a teacher calling his close friend by his last name to his students.

They wrote a book together.  _ Pryce & Carter's Deep Space Survival Procedure and Protocol Manual. _ Goddard was only just getting into real deep space travel, largely due to the urging of Mr. Carter and his predecessors. The world was growing, and the Goddard Futuristics Communications Department was right at the center.

—

The little girl wasn’t little at all anymore. She was grown, now, and she had used the same technology she used to build Matthew Neumann a new body to fix her own. She rebuilt her heart out of wire and patched her lungs with plastic and she was not bothered by being more robot than person. In fact, she thought it suited her. 

Once her own body was in working order, she set out to help her oldest and only friend with his plans. She called him William, now, not Matthew, but he called her Miranda, same as always. 

He wanted to reach the farthest stars. She wanted to keep creating. They worked together perfectly.

—

Matthew Neumann changed faces every few years. He introduced himself over and over again to the same people, and met new ones every day. He went to parties and dinners and watched the little girl turn to a woman and keep growing and slowly replacing every piece of herself until her nails were hard and sharp as knives and her coke-bottle glasses were thrown aside in favor of simply making better eyes. The world changed and grew. Matthew’s childhood friends had children and grandchildren and gravestones. 

Matthew was Charles Curr when he met the teenage boy on the streets of Chicago while he was on a business trip. The boy was no older than Matthew had been when the soldiers stormed his house, but this boy had no house to storm. His pockets were full of cigarettes and gas station receipts and switchblades, and he looked like Kurt Cobain’s fresh corpse minus ten years and plus a couple scars. Mr. Curr liked him immediately.

Through a maneuver that was half coercion and half kidnapping, Curr brought the boy back to his home in Cape Canaveral. He gave him a house and food and an after-school job and the skills needed to effectively pin one’s crimes on someone one doesn’t like. 

The boy’s name was Warren. To anyone at Goddard, Mr. Curr had taken in his nephew. Warren Kepler, Mr. Curr’s kid. Warren Kepler, Matthew’s little pet project. Dr. Pryce hated him. But she tolerated him.

—

Warren grew up. He went to the military but came back to Goddard and made himself indispensable. Captain, Major, Colonel. He built his own little ragtag team that he called the SI-5 and he believed he understood things. He did not.

Mr. Curr became Mr. Neiman became Mr. Hyland became Mr. Fletcher became Mr. Cutter and no one ever knew. Save for one particularly nosy reporter, but Mr. Cutter dealt with her quickly. She became his most trusted advisor. 

Dr. Pryce grew older, but hardly anyone seemed to notice. She didn’t show her face often enough for anyone to remember whether something was different about her.

The world spun around, and humans got farther and farther away from it. Mr. Cutter didn’t have to lay out in the grass on his back to see the stars any more. If he wanted, he could walk up and touch them. They were his; he had bought them with his childhood and his mortality and they had accepted the offer. They had had no choice.

Mr. Cutter smiled, and stepped onto the  _ Sol _ with enough in his pocket to buy the Earth, too, and every intention of completing the transaction.


End file.
